A high-order semi-explicit discontinuous Galerkin solver for 3D incompressible flow with application to DNS and LES of turbulent channel flow

We present an efficient discontinuous Galerkin scheme for simulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations including laminar and turbulent flow. We consider a semi-explicit high-order velocity-correction method for time integration as well as nodal equal-order discretizations for velocity and pressure. The non-linear convective term is treated explicitly while a linear system is solved for the pressure Poisson equation and the viscous term. The key feature of our solver is a consistent penalty term reducing the local divergence error in order to overcome recently reported instabilities in spatially under-resolved high-Reynolds-number flows as well as small time steps. This penalty method is similar to the grad-div stabilization widely used in continuous finite elements. We further review and compare our method to several other techniques recently proposed in literature to stabilize the method for such flow configurations. The solver is specifically designed for large-scale computations through matrix-free linear solvers including efficient preconditioning strategies and tensor-product elements, which have allowed us to scale this code up to 34.4 billion degrees of freedom and 147,456 CPU cores. We validate our code and demonstrate optimal convergence rates with laminar flows present in a vortex problem and flow past a cylinder and show applicability of our solver to direct numerical simulation as well as implicit large-eddy simulation of turbulent channel flow at $Re_{\tau}=180$ as well as $590$.Comment: 28 pages, in preparation for submission to Journal of Computational Physic

BoSSS: a package for multigrid extended discontinuous Galerkin methods

The software package BoSSS serves the discretization of (steady-state or time-dependent) partial differential equations with discontinuous coefficients and/or time-dependent domains by means of an eXtended Discontinuous Galerkin (XDG, resp. DG) method, aka. cut-cell DG, aka. unfitted DG. This work consists of two major parts: First, the XDG method is introduced and a formal notation is developed, which captures important numerical details such as cell-agglomeration and a multigrid framework. In the second part, iterative solvers for extended DG systems are presented and their performance is evaluated

Compatible finite element methods for geophysical fluid dynamics

This article surveys research on the application of compatible finite element methods to large scale atmosphere and ocean simulation. Compatible finite element methods extend Arakawa's C-grid finite difference scheme to the finite element world. They are constructed from a discrete de Rham complex, which is a sequence of finite element spaces which are linked by the operators of differential calculus. The use of discrete de Rham complexes to solve partial differential equations is well established, but in this article we focus on the specifics of dynamical cores for simulating weather, oceans and climate. The most important consequence of the discrete de Rham complex is the Hodge-Helmholtz decomposition, which has been used to exclude the possibility of several types of spurious oscillations from linear equations of geophysical flow. This means that compatible finite element spaces provide a useful framework for building dynamical cores. In this article we introduce the main concepts of compatible finite element spaces, and discuss their wave propagation properties. We survey some methods for discretising the transport terms that arise in dynamical core equation systems, and provide some example discretisations, briefly discussing their iterative solution. Then we focus on the recent use of compatible finite element spaces in designing structure preserving methods, surveying variational discretisations, Poisson bracket discretisations, and consistent vorticity transport.Comment: correction of some typo

Incompressible Finite Elements via Hybridization. Part I: The Stokes System in Two Space Dimensions

In this paper, we introduce a new and efficient way to compute exactly divergence-free velocity approximations for the Stokes equations in two space dimensions. We begin by considering a mixed method that provides an exactly divergence-free approximation of the velocity and a continuous approximation of the vorticity. We then rewrite this method solely in terms of the tangential fluid velocity and the pressure on mesh edges by means of a new hybridization technique. This novel formulation bypasses the difficult task of constructing an exactly divergence-free basis for velocity approximations. Moreover, the discrete system resulting from our method has fewer degrees of freedom than the original mixed method since the pressure and the tangential velocity variables are defined just on the mesh edges. Once these variables are computed, the velocity approximation satisfying the incompressibility condition exactly, as well as the continuous numerical approximation of the vorticity, can at once be obtained locally. Moreover, a discontinuous numerical approximation of the pressure within elements can also be obtained locally. We show how to compute the matrix system for our tangential velocity-pressure formulation on general meshes and present in full detail such computations for the lowest-order case of our method

On the convergence order of the finite element error in the kinetic energy for high Reynolds number incompressible flows

The kinetic energy of a flow is proportional to the square of the norm of the velocity. Given a sufficient regular velocity field and a velocity finite element space with polynomials of degree , then the best approximation error in is of order . In this survey, the available finite element error analysis for the velocity error in is reviewed, where is a final time. Since in practice the case of small viscosity coefficients or dominant convection is of particular interest, which may result in turbulent flows, robust error estimates are considered, i.e., estimates where the constant in the error bound does not depend on inverse powers of the viscosity coefficient. Methods for which robust estimates can be derived enable stable flow simulations for small viscosity coefficients on comparatively coarse grids, which is often the situation encountered in practice. To introduce stabilization techniques for the convection-dominated regime and tools used in the error analysis, evolutionary linear convection–diffusion equations are studied at the beginning. The main part of this survey considers robust finite element methods for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations of order , , and for the velocity error in . All these methods are discussed in detail. In particular, a sketch of the proof for the error bound is given that explains the estimate of important terms which determine finally the order of convergence. Among them, there are methods for inf–sup stable pairs of finite element spaces as well as for pressure-stabilized discretizations. Numerical studies support the analytic results for several of these methods. In addition, methods are surveyed that behave in a robust way but for which only a non-robust error analysis is available. The conclusion of this survey is that the problem of whether or not there is a robust method with optimal convergence order for the kinetic energy is still open